Gamera against The Great Old Ones
by Jim Ryan Hamm
Summary: Features Gamera and draws from the events of the Showa-period films, 1965-1971, rectifying their sillier elements. I've attempted to place the character in a serious mythological context, positing the kaiju as an agent of primordial forces—an Elder God.
1. Helen Remembers

"_See the Turtle of enormous girth!  
On his shell he holds the earth.  
His thought is slow but always kind;__  
He holds us all within his mind.__  
On his back all vows are made;__  
He sees the truth but mayn't aid.__  
He loves the land and loves the sea,  
And even loves a child like me_."  
~ children's rhyme  
(Stephen King, "The Dark Tower")

**Prologue**

To little Helen, it looked at first like the tip of a mountain, the peak of a newborn island breaking the ocean's surface. Her Papa showed her a film reel a few months before about the formation of islands, and Helen was most excited to learn that there were volcanoes under the sea. "Some even bigger than Mount Fuji," he claimed. Helen doubted it. She wasn't yet 7 years old and had trouble imagining anything on land or sea bigger than her adopted homeland's iconic landmark. But, Papa explained, these underwater volcanoes exploded sometimes just like they did on land—and when they exploded the sea's floor buckled and new islands formed. The segment of the film was animated and the narrator said that islands only took shape over many, many years.

This one, however, was surfacing right before her eyes, halfway between Papa's motorboat and the horizon, with nothing but the shimmering, calm ocean between them. When Helen squinted, she had to admit it didn't look like a mountain, really, not anymore. The saline waters of Tokyo Bay had cascaded off of it and what she saw now resembled a great, steel-gray wedge, oriented in their direction. It was like the armored dorsal fin of an animal from one of her picture books on ancient, extinct life. Her Papa was a marine biologist and gave her stuff like that to read, hoping Helen would share his love for the sea and all the wonders it ever contained.

But all Helen felt for the wondrous, limitless sea at that moment was fear. The towering fin had turned and began to slice its way through the waves toward them. Papa and his colleague, Dr. Yosuke Ishikawa, were not moving, and neither was their boat. Kenichi, Dr. Ishikawa's son, was struggling with the belt. Ken was only a bit older than she was and Helen wasn't certain he was strong enough to get the motor running.

_Don't be afraid_, Helen, whispered The Voice. Her invisible new companion was barely comforting. _My mate will give Ken the strength he needs. _She believed The Voice, but only just understood the concept of "mate." The Voice, and presumably, another Voice that only Ken could hear, had just helped the children escape a submerged UFO and a spacewoman who put their fathers into a trance.

---

It started out as a nice, normal day. Helen just wanted to spend time with Papa, who was so often busy with his research and his job as curator of Kamogawa Sea World. She should never have followed that mischievous Kenichi, whose father likewise worked at the park, but the boy convinced her they wouldn't be punished. Not too badly, anyway.

The last hour was a surreal blur to her. Helen and Ken had stowed away on their fathers' boat and ate all their sandwiches. The water was calm, the sun shone, and she was just happy to be this close to Papa on one of his adventures. They were discovered around the adults' lunchtime, but Papa was too preoccupied to be angry with her. The biologists had seen something strange crash into the ocean.

Helen saw something in the sky, too. Something that thrilled Ken but something she couldn't really understand. She didn't want to understand it. It was monstrous and ugly. It spun and trailed fire, a cyclone of flame and smoke and it frightened her. Papa and Dr. Ishikawa paid it no mind, as if this hideous, bizarre thing were as much a part of the scenery as the waves and the clouds. It was not the "something strange" they were looking for, anyway. Helen couldn't imagine anything stranger and wasn't listening to Kenichi's breathless exposition at all. She closed her eyes shut the scary thing from her mind.

When she opened them again Helen was still in the boat, but they were no longer on the sea. Somehow, she had been transported inside a bright, circular room. The concave walls were covered with vibrantly colored machines, screens, levers, buttons, and lights arranged on tall circular panels. Ken was beside her, as were their fathers. They climbed out of the boat and before them stood the spacewoman. Helen remembered her mean face and shiny, metallic clothes. The spacewoman said she was from another planet but she looked like a young Japanese woman, pretty enough to be an actress, maybe, thought Helen. The spacewoman threatened them, and threatened the Earth. She said her name, or was it their name? She said they were... it sounded like _Zigra_.

The spacewoman bragged that her species' technology was so advanced it could make earthquakes. She said they could easily level a city as big as Tokyo, and as their fathers pleaded, the spacewoman fiddled with some levers and buttons. A circular panel irised open and the view screen behind it revealed Japan's capital in ruins. Helen did not believe it was real. The adults and the spacewoman argued about whether or not humanity would happily surrender to Zigra. She made her eyes glow red and put Papa and Dr. Ishikawa into a trance.

But then a voice from nowhere whispered to Helen, its tone pleasant and comforting. Helen didn't think anyone else heard it as it told her to stand strong and resist the spacewoman's "telepathy." The Voice said it would protect her and its mate would protect Ken. The children bolted in two directions as the flustered spacewoman failed to grab them. The Voice guided them to an array of controls on the wall of the alien room. Ken moved his hands over a touch-sensitive pad. The lights went dim red and the spacewoman froze, locked in a trance of her own. The children led their catatonic fathers to the boat and Ken returned to the strange levers and buttons. _My mate will give Ken the teleportation sequence_, confided The Voice. While Helen didn't really understand what The Voice was talking about, she knew it meant her and Ken no harm. _We must escape the Usurper and inform your people_, it stated before they were awash in a yellow-green light. Transported back to the ocean's surface, Helen mustered the wherewithal to ask The Voice who it was. _We are all Zigra_, it confided, and Helen could almost hear it sigh.

---

Kenichi had given up on the motor, deciding instead to assemble the sail. The metallic fin still made a zigzagging path toward them, and the children noticed that it was jagged, with three tapering points. The boy didn't angle the boat to shore right away in the hopes of evading the monster. For a moment, Helen thought they were saved when she spotted an old freighter in the bay. _It won't help us_, declared The Voice with a hint of regret. Ken must have realized it, too, or maybe his own Voice realized it for him, because he gave the vessel a wide birth. Unfortunately, the ship got between the giant fin and its prey.

Helen was too young to really understand catastrophe. Her 7 year old mind couldn't comprehend the instant death of dozens or hundreds any more than it could unravel the bizarre events of the past hour. The saw-toothed fin sliced through the freighter like a knife, severing it into two flaming pieces. Helen looked away impassively as The Voice addressed her again. _We are sorry_, it said dejectedly, _to have brought this to your people_.

When the fin drew so close she could see her own reflection upon its metallic plates, Helen finally fathomed tragedy and mortality—her own, Ken's, Papa's, Dr. Ishikawa's, and the poor men within that inferno of what was once the freighter, perishing from the flames or drawn forever under the crashing waves.

_We are sorry we couldn't save you_, confessed The Voice, _the Usurper closes_. Ken screamed. Helen closed her eyes and put her hands over her ears. _We are sorry_, repeated The Voice.

Helen prayed. She thought about her mother and her older sister on the shore. She thought about the wonderful animals at the park where Papa worked. She wanted to work there too, one day, to play with the seals and brush the orcas' teeth. She prayed for all of them, family, friends, and animals, prayed they would be safe from the incomprehensible, alien _thing _bearing down on her, the monster that toppled cities and put fathers into trances and cut through ships. She prayed for those sharing her imminent fate, Papa, and Dr. Ishikawa, and that troublemaker Kenichi. She couldn't find it in her to blame Ken for the whole awful mess even though she really wished she hadn't gone along with him on his mischief today. She should have stayed ashore with Sis and Mama. She even prayed for The Voice, whoever or whatever it was, as she felt its resignation and sorrow. Only then did Helen pray for herself, and hoped beyond hope that the ocean wasn't too cold.

Eyes still tightly shut, the girl heard a bloodcurdling scream. For a moment, she thought it was Ken's, or her own, or both of them. But Helen knew she wasn't screaming, and the noise she heard was no human scream—though it was faintly human-like. Nor was it coming from the boat. The scream seemed to emerge from everywhere and resounded all around her, making Helen's knees knock and teeth rattle. It was like a chorus of elephants bellowing in unanimous pain or rapture. It was filled with torment and rage, suggesting emotions beyond that of simple beasts. It made the air shimmer. The scream rose impossibly shrill in pitch before trailing off to a rumbling growl. It was the wail of a thousand millennia, the battle cry of angels, the voice of an avenging god.

Helen's eyes would not open. Where moments before she had felt on her skin the spray of the frigid sea, Helen was now battered by hot, dry winds and the acrid smell of burning gasses. She suddenly felt the heavy wrench of gravity, like she was in an elevator rising way too fast. Helen finally opened her eyes against the wind and smoke, barely, but kept them low. She was still in the boat, with Ken and their unconscious fathers. Ken was in tears as the smoke was finally cleared away by rushing winds. He was pointing up, past her, over her right shoulder. "Gah…" Ken stammered. "Gam…" Helen turned to look toward where the boy was pointing.

It was the eye she took in first, a great, wary, human-like eye, its pupil moving back and forth. The bearer of that eye scrutinized Helen and gazed beyond her at the same time, assessing the sky it soared through. Even from a distance she judged to be several meters, Helen knew the eye was many times bigger than her, and it seemed to possess an intelligence unlike any animal's. She beheld the creature's colossal reptilian head in profile—its discerning eye was positioned above a maw crowded with thick, crocodilian fangs. It had terrible upward pointing tusks, each as big as a truck and probably capable of piercing one, situated where the corners of its mouth met its scaly cheeks. Helen could barely make out the rest of the monster's armored vastness. It was not unlike a _kame_, as the Japanese called similar creatures, pronounced very like "gahm-eh." A giant turtle, clearly intelligent, a turtle with teeth, and a turtle that flew, propelled by great jets of flame trailing from the posterior of its shell. Not a turtle, then.

Gamera.

Kenichi had called it Gamera.

Gamera shrieked again. The unforgettable, primordial sound popped both Helen's ears and echoed in her skull, drowning out the terrified, alien chatter of The Voice. She was no longer afraid, though, or even concerned. Less than an hour before, Kenichi had tried to explain that this awesome being was a friend to children—and to all humanity. Helen did not want to hear it, she could not believe it of such a frightening monster. While she would spend the rest of her life wondering what Gamera was and where it came from, Helen would always regret her initial reaction—her hope to never see it again.

She was glad Gamera answered her prayers, anyway. She believed now in its benevolence, and would always believe. Looking back over twenty-five years, Dr. Helen Wallace never felt as safe as she did at that pivotal moment—she a little girl, taken aloft and away from peril in the palm of Gamera's mighty hand.


	2. Return to the Arctic

"_There is One that inhabits the place of utter cold, and One that respireth where none other may draw breath. In the days to come He shall issue forth among the isles and cities of men, and shall bring with Him as a white doom the wind that slumbereth in his dwelling_."  
~ The prophet Lith, from the Parchments of Pnom  
(Clark Ashton Smith, "The Coming of the White Worm")

**Lincoln Sea, northwest of Greenland, 1980**

_Here is where it began_, it thought. Gamera returned to the wintry barrens, where nearby it was awakened fifteen revolutions of this world around its star prior. Its accidental release from its icy entombment was not, in fact, the "beginning" of which its wandering thoughts had turned. Gamera's memory encompassed vast ages before recorded history, when the past was accounted for and subsequently forgotten, when the very ability to understand the passage of time was gleaned, lost, and recovered only tens of thousands of years later. It was so very old. Indeed, Gamera, under different names to divergent cultures, wherever a notion of its activities and image survived—stained with primitive dyes on cavern walls, given celestial distinction in the star charts of the first astrologers, accorded the burden of the world itself upon its back in the songs of the medicine lodges—was a symbol of longevity itself.

This is where Gamera was born—or made—and where it would be lost for so many eons. The dragon turtle recalled that before the shifting of the poles this frozen wasteland was verdant—a place where the waning gods of Eld had walked among that era's human analogues and prepared them for the dangers posed by the quiescent, primordial evils. In those days, the line between humanity and divinity was thin—mortals dwelt nigh as the gods themselves and venerated the greatest of them as their regents. Those golden days were filled with learning and pleasure—summer was eternal, sustenance was plentiful, and humanity's dreams were made extant by means of sorcery and super-science. The Eld and their disciples were higher beings, and they created marvels that the debased hominids of the modern age would only tremble at the sight of, alchemical and theurgical wonders humanity today could scarcely comprehend.

Gamera knew first hand, for it was among those very wonders. It had certainly invoked in contemporary humans far more than trembling throughout the duration of its return—tearful supplication on occasion and, too often, breech-wetting fear. Gamera could not fault the naked apes who had inherited the earth too much for their alarm. It was, after all, designed to be a warrior and a terror, a defender against the chaos spawn of distant stars, a soldier against the primeval lurkers of the blackened depths, a predator of the odious prowlers of the spaces between spaces. The Black Guardian of the North had finally restored itself to its full height of 80 meters. The edges of its bio-metallic carapace had sharpened into serrations. The talons of Gamera's scaly hands had lengthened exponentially to better rend the sickening flesh of its colossal foes. Though its ancient reputation had survived the ages in the form of diluted legends and myths, and its commitment to hunt down and destroy the emergent Old Ones remained as true as it had been in long lost Hyperborea—humanity continued to fear and oppose Gamera.

If it were not for two characteristics existent in modern mortals, Gamera would hardly regret the furious rampage that it carried out immediately following its awakening. An atomic accident had forced the super monster from its dreamless slumber and its first impression was that of a degenerate, corruptible mankind, a pathetic race far removed from its nigh-divine antecedents. This was a people, Gamera reasoned, upon the precipice of its own damnation. It could smell the influence of the Old Ones upon them—these creatures akin to the savage, simian folk of its antediluvian birthplace; who made gory offerings to Cthulhu and Tsathoggua in benighted enclaves on the fringes of grand Commoriom. While they were clearly, albeit distantly, descended from the Eld and their mortal attendants of lost Hyperborea, Mu, Kantapuranam, and Alanhati—the passage of time, and perhaps, indiscriminate breeding with more degenerate anthropoids had debased humanity beyond salvation.

Or so it thought. For during its war against them Gamera was exposed to the innocence of mankind's children, and the indomitability of the human spirit. The former, in the shape of a fearless, awe-struck child, had captivated the enraged creature, briefly assuaging it. A mere child had understood Gamera, had instinctively recognized the righteousness of its purpose. Though the rampaging monster had indirectly endangered the young boy in the first place, it decided to spare him. Gamera would spend several days contemplating the meaning of this encounter before ultimately, grimly resigning itself to its original course of extermination. The human spirit, on the other hand, ultimately defeated it, much to Gamera's astonishment. Rather than face their extinction as the decadent, inherently selfish primate vermin it had mistook them for, mankind rallied together, pooled their greatest technologies, and—while they could not, could _never_, destroy it—they managed to banish Gamera from the very planet it was designed to protect. Mere men had defeated a near-god!

When Gamera returned to earth, after a brief period of reflection, it was still angry, yes, but amenable to the idea that there was a purpose to its accidental release from its icy prison beyond that of humanity's total destruction. When a corrupted lesser Old One from the island remnants of Mu began its own terrible predation upon human civilization, Gamera's alternate suspicions were confirmed. The stars were right. The Old Ones were awakening. Gamera would don his ancient mantle of defender, if not for mankind as it had become, but for humanity's future, for the spark of divinity it retained in the form of its children.

And so it was. Gamera's toils were nearly ceaseless for several years. Its foes were mostly the less significant banes of the ancients, though even these battles were compounded in difficulty by the frustrating quality of humans to _get in the way_. Yet on some occasions the great guardian might have met its end if not for timely human intervention. The draconic doom of sunken Mu, Barugon, was unleashed upon Osaka and only defeated after Gamera learned from humans of the sickly creature's aversion to water. The blight of Alanhati, the vampiric god-avian Gyaos, was severely weakened by the same mortal ingenuity that vexed Gamera two years prior. An invasion from planet Vhoorl was thwarted when two children the aliens were using as hostages managed to break Gamera free from the Great Old One's mental domination. When human negligence was responsible for removing the Elder eidolon imprisoning the formidable Devil Beast Jiger, the Old One managed to infect the monster turtle with its parasitic progeny. Gamera was only wrenched from the jaws of defeat after a pair of brave boys relieved it of this cancerous infection.

Certainly, humanity still feared it and continued to misunderstand its intentions. The militaries of the world still put themselves in harm's way more often than not when Gamera clearly was their last, best hope against some rampaging entity. While they would find its mind difficult to comprehend, Gamera often lamented the loss of humankind's telepathy—which at least permitted for some rudimentary communication between them. Perhaps this was for the best, as it allowed the grim protector to ignore the few bystanders remaining underfoot when duty called it into population centers. If the past few years had any wisdom to engrave into its ancient, nigh-immortal mind, it was that there was too high a price for Gamera's compassion. Were it not for empathy, the monster could have sacrificed the Vhoorls' two young hostages and prevented the destruction it was subsequently coerced into. Gamera should have immolated the archeologists at the Wester Island dig site rather than allow them to release the Devil Beast Jiger, who would go on to harm thousands of innocents.

In the near future, Gamera considered, it would express far less sentimentality when it was working. From now until the turning of the age, when the Great Old Ones were quiescent once again, the Black Tortoise would be focused and pragmatic. It was an agent of primordial forces, it had a job to do, and that job was cosmic in scope. It'd sacrifice hundreds of lives to preserve a thousand. It would incinerate a thousand, children and otherwise, to salvage a million—its "Friend to All Children" epithet notwithstanding. Gamera would try, at least. Humanity's survival into the next golden age counted upon it, monstrous creation of the vanished Elder Gods, whether or not they knew or appreciated it.

---

This night, however, the only bystanders near the vicinity of Gamera's target destination were the seals, the white bears that hunted them, the spiral horned narwhals that swam lazily in the saline depths beneath the sheets of ice covering the sea's surface—and Charles Crawley, CEO and chairman of Alrayn-Crawley Financial.

Crawley gazed over the ice-covered railing of the Blæst Gående oil platform, derelict as of a few minutes ago, to take in the desolate vastness of the frozen sea, lit only by the stars, a sliver of moon, and the aurora borealis. Standing over two meters tall, bald and ebony-skinned, and dressed only in a black business suit to warm him against the wind-struck, sub-zero temperatures of his surroundings, Crawley cut an imposing, shadowy outline diametrically opposed to the whiteness of the landscape. Sharing the bleak pallor of the arctic barrens was the oil platform itself, now laying askew at a forty degree slant, its steely-gray railings and walkways, asphalt decks, and concrete towers completely enveloped in a crystalline sheen of blue-white ice. One might mistake the super-structure as having been abandoned for years, were it not for the presence of the corpses—dozens or perhaps hundreds of men lying, bent over, kneeling or standing upright in stiff, rigid postures. The recently deceased workmen resembled porcelain effigies, their flesh and clothing rendered blue-white by the sudden preternatural cold that blasted them and lingered still. Upon each face was frozen a rictus of sheer terror or a grimace of agony, blue-lipped mouths agape revealing broken teeth—shattered from final living moments spent chattering uncontrollably.

Charles Crawley paid the dead no mind, nor bemoaned the loss of the expensive platform, which he owned via a ACF subsidiary known as Peripheral Petroleum. The project had served its purpose. There was no further need to compensate the Danish crown for the rights to siphon the black crude from an undersea mountain whose peak reached a few dozen feet below sea level. Crawley knew in the long term the sludge mined here was no oil, and would probably prove unviable as an energy source. At the moment it was stored in reserve in massive Peripheral facilities across the globe. For a rainy day, Crawley mused. In any case, the sable stew needed to be drained away, like contaminated blood during a transfusion. For that is what it was indeed—blood. The financing, construction, and maintenance of Blæst Gående was a massive operation, in a very literal sense.

Several kilometers to the north, yet perceptible to the mogul's keen senses, was the enormous architect of the platform's upending, and the cause of the deadly, preternatural frost upon the workmen that no normal flame could thaw. Its flesh was pasty-white like that of a beached, rotting squid. Its shape was bloated and serpentine, externally segmented every few meters by ringed rims like the annuli of a worm. The entity rolled and slid itself like a sidewinder across the sheets of ice. As it stretched and contorted, it was difficult to determine the thing's total length, but Crawley judged its average at about 350 meters. Its thickness spanned about 45-50 meters at its most swollen point a quarter of the way down its length from its head. Crawley knew not where the creature intended to go, nor did he care, though he suspected it sought a new iceberg in which to make its mobile lair—as its notorious domicile had been affixed to the sea floor for a thousand generations. The Old One and its recently abandoned home, _Yikilth_, were known to Crawley through rare occult texts such as the _Book of Eibon_, an ancient memoir that had survived the eons to offer a glimpse of life and magic in lost Hyperborea. _Rlim Shaikorth_, the creature was called, and it once traversed the northern seas in its glacial citadel, assailing ships and ports with a lethal cold for reasons no mortal could fathom. Twenty or so millennia ago, the White Worm was feared and worshipped as a god.

The creature suddenly broke its rapid stride and coiled itself like some vulgar mockery of a rattlesnake. It turned its flattened disk-like face toward the southeast. Crawley beheld the monster's pale, gaping mouth and sunken, crimson eyes—which looked more like bleeding, abscessed sores than apparati for seeing. Crawley didn't need turn to know what approached—he knew well what was powerful enough to give a Great Old One pause.

"Rlim Shaikorth," Crawley called, "the enemy cometh." The entrepreneur's voice was deeply resonant, deliberate, and pleasant. It betrayed a trace of African inflection, though if any person was around to hear Crawley speak, they would be very hard pressed to determine the precise origins of his accent.

Crawley shouted: "Freeze this wretched spawn of the Eld to its bones! Return it to a hibernation to outlast the eons, lest it persist in thwarting the rightful return of your fellows. For once you did in ages past, so you must do again!"

The echoic, shrill hum of Gamera's rotary flight amplified to a ear-splitting clamor as it passed over the ruined oil platform. Four blue jets of ionized flame emanated from the chelonian monster's leg and arm cavities, each curving as it spun like a flaming shuriken toward the White Worm. Great trails of exhaust, tendrils of smoke intertwining into dissipating braids, followed in the wake of the whirling shell. Suddenly, Gamera extinguished two of its thrusters and presented its forelimbs and head. As if in answer to Crawley's threats on the Old One's behalf, Gamera shrieked a roar of its own—that iconic elephantine battle cry which made titans quake. It surged toward coiling Rlim Shaikorth on the awesome power of its rear rockets alone. Forearms extended outward to level its flying charge, Gamera gulped back its reptilian head. Waddled throat orange and aglow, the Guardian of the North opened its tusked jaws and eructed.

Rlim Shaikorth barely flinched as Gamera unleashed a volley of plasma fireballs toward it. The flying colossus veered to the White Worm's left and upward. The nighttime landscape, previously green and blue lit by the blazing aurora, flashed reddish-orange in the seconds between the fireballs' discharge and impact. Crawley, having studied the monster do-gooder for years, knew that Gamera's magnetoplasmic fireballs burned hotter than a solar flare. Few beings in the cosmos could feel the bite of those flames and not blister, though the effect was usually, terminally worse. Rlim Shaikorth was courting its own demise by just sitting there and staring with its stupid, red globular eyes at the incoming missiles. For a moment, the Old One reminded Crawley of a cobra charmed by a flautist in a Middle Eastern bazaar, or a deer on the highway transfixed by the headlights of an approaching truck. Perhaps, mused Crawley, Rlim Shaikorth was disoriented by his recent awakening. Or perhaps it never was a terror equal to the reputation ascribed it in the codices of the ancients.

Crawley half-expected an explosion of ionic fire, black blood, and charred wormish flesh. What he saw instead were three fireballs vanish into smoky wisps within a few meters of Rlim Shaikorth's corkscrewed bulk.

_Aha_! thought the chairman, _the White Worm protects itself with a field of absolute zero cold. Not even Gamera's flames can burn at that temperature! _The serpentine abomination uncoiled, slithered aside, and turned its head northward where Gamera was coming in for another aerial approach. This time, the monster turtle attempted a strafing run with its continuous "tongue" of superheated plasma. While it carved a deep steaming trench in the polar ice toward its annelid foe, Gamera's tongue of fire arched up and over Rlim Shaikorth's body before continuing on behind it, utterly failing to make contact with the Old One's flesh.

Charles Crawley laughed heartily. Again Gamera screeched, a roar of frustration that carried miles on the arctic winds. Unfortunately for the mysterious CEO, Gamera was intelligent enough to know that should it attempt to engage Rlim Shaikorth with fang and claw, its tissues, tough as they were, would quickly succumb to the cold that froze even molecules. Crawley amused himself momentarily with a mental picture of the reptilian behemoth flailing away at its foe while its frostbitten talons and snout broke apart amid gouts of green blood. In reality, the avatar of the Eld withdrew its head and forelimbs and reignited bluish flames from its arm cavities. Gamera resumed its saucer-like flight and wheeled toward its prey, likely gambling that its nigh-invulnerable, jagged-edged shell would protect it while severing the Old One in half.

Suddenly, as if to say, _my turn_, the White Worm's wide, toothless maw shifted expression from shocked animal stupidity to a menacing sneer. The monster annelid made a sound like a backwards wail that accompanied its enormous intake of breath. A thick ring-like bulge took shape around the creature's body, halfway between its face and its bloated mid-segments. Rlim Shaikorth reared up like a striking cobra, revealing a sphincter-like orifice on its swelling clitellum. The pulsating, fleshy ring glowed with pallid light. As Gamera spun toward it, the thickened gland-sack of the White Worm deflated—expelling from the orifice an intense, monochrome helix of energy.

The expanding cone of light caught the chelonian demigod dead on. Its propulsion fires died. A frost instantly congealed upon its bio-metallic shell. Dead spinning on inertia several kilometers toward the northwest, Gamera impacted and embedded itself three-quarters its width deep in an icy cliff. The landscape trembled with the shock of the enormous creature's crash. Rlim Shaikorth trumpeted its victory with more strange, backwards keening, nearly drowning out the noisome echo of the riven glacier.

The frozen deck of the Blæst Gående was silent save for a whistle of wind, the slight groaning produced by the swaying of the platform's construction, and the self-satisfied cracking of Charles Crawley's knuckles.


	3. Gamera Entombed

"_They found him, far out on the ice, torn to pieces, as is the way with those whom the spirits have punished for refusing to observe the customs of their forefathers. And the son, who was bound to the sledge, had not been touched, but he had died of fright_."  
~ Artuk, Who Did All Forbidden Things  
(Knud Rasmussen [compiler], "Eskimo Folk-Tales")

**Lincoln Sea, northwest of Greenland, 1980**

Arluk struggled with the weight of the walrus's carcass. The ropes dug into his right shoulder and burned. Step by excruciating step, the hunter dragged the rickety sled behind him. The Inuit's wide, sealskin _kamik_ crunched into a thin layer of snow that wafted idly across the sea ice. Sweat poured into his eyes, while an ice formed of snot and labored exhalations clung to his bushy whiskers. Arluk damned his aching muscles, the arthritic pains familiar to any man of late middle age. He should not have had to tackle a seal hunt alone, but nearly all left of the able-bodied Nakotiqa tribesmen had succumbed to sickness. The others had abandoned their territory long ago to seek work among the white man, vanishing into their cities and ships, forsaking the old ways—and the ways of Arluk's folk were older than most.

Other Inuit tribes would also say "stranger than most." Few had dealings with the inbred Nakotiqa, who were called, variously, in the inconsistent tongues of the Arctic folk "those not like us." They were among the most remote tribes and dwelt the furthest north, roaming the ice bridging Greenland and Ellesmere Island, rarely journeying further south than the Robeson Channel. The persistence of the missionaries who discovered them during the Great War would subdue their most peculiar traditions, but even after converting to the white man's faith, Arluk's people remained alone. If the anthropologists of the day endeavored to pay the insular tribe more attention, they'd have discovered a fathomless heritage, older even than the extinct Tuniit folk who preceded the Inuit, as ancient as the stones and structures buried beneath kilometers of ice and just as unfamiliar to modern scholarship. The prehistoric Nakotiqa mingled with the giant Tuniit and later, the Eskimos as to make their own features and language nigh-indistinguishable from their Arctic neighbors. But a careful observer might note the golden cast to the flesh of a rare few of them, the curly Assyrian thickness of some of the men's beards, or the flowing tawny locks of their most coveted women. This theoretical onlooker, being most fortunate, might have chanced upon the unusual presence among the Nakotiqa of eyes tinted a muted emerald or grey, of which a bearer was born but once in many, many generations.

If such notions ever occurred to Arluk, he paid them no heed. The hunter was a practical man, and jaded. Despite the badgering of his wife, he paid scant service to the prayers taught to his parents and grandparents by bullying missionaries. Likewise, he rarely heeded the rites crucial to placating the spirits and souls which every Nakotiqa knew to dwell in the land, the winds, and the animals. The quest for meat was Arluk's reality, and the walrus would provide so much of it, along with lamp oil, leather, and bone. Besides, the blubbery beast was already mortally wounded when the huntsman stumbled across it, by a bear that most likely limped away worse off than its intended prey. _Let the bear worry about the walrus's spirit_, thought Arluk. He had more realistic concerns, like how to haul the 1800 kilogram carcass home on a sleigh that was already uncertain to sustain the weight of a few seals. Even should he manage the load, Arluk would likely be very late in returning home, many hours into the darkest part of the night. A less stubborn man would have forsaken the task as impossible.

Save for a sturdy steel knife, Arluk was unarmed, having broken his spear leveraging the walrus onto his sled. The hunter winced when he noticed the transport's right runner was bent at a slight outward angle beneath the weight of his impractical cargo. As he heaved and pulled, Arluk lamented the loss of the tribe's sled dogs, who over the past decade had run off starved; or were eaten themselves as times grew ever leaner and desperate for the Nakotiqa. The man remained undeterred, however. He was lucky indeed to find this prize and the snow was light enough that he only needed to keep the runners oiled to make sufficient progress back to the camp. It was but a few kilometers, and the impending night would be alight with the aurora. The lack of dogs, a broken spear, and the bent runner were mere setbacks. At least, they were minor concerns compared to the possibility that the bear might return—after licking its own wounds—to claim its wounded prey. A bear who likewise left limping tracks and a trail of blood droplets in the same general direction Arluk was headed.

Halfway to the camp, the sea ice sloped upward, rising to the north. Arluk strove to remain south of the rise on relatively flat terrain. It was on the crest of the rise he caught site of the bear. While his heart seemed to creep up his throat, Arluk drew his knife. A year ago, the Inuit had traded a narwhal horn for the stainless steel blade, to one of the white roughnecks who worked on the oil rig a kilometer north of where he now stood rooted with shaky legs. The bear, for its part, reared awkwardly upon its hind legs, facing not the Inuit hunter and his corpulent burden, but away toward the foreigners' superstructure. For a few seconds, Arluk had thoughts that wavered between fending off what ought to be a severely wounded bear and running for his life. He decided, simply, to wait and see what his legs would do when the bear finally caught scent of the bloated pinniped's corpse. There was an impasse of several minutes in which Arluk waited for the giant white carnivore to turn its gaze away from the aurora-lit horizon, drop to all fours and charge down toward him. It never did, and the hunter soon realized it never would. He had never seen a bear stand on its hind legs for so long and remain motionless. Something was not right.

Knife still drawn, Arluk left the sled and cautiously stomped up the crest to the immobile bear. As the rise steepened, the hunter was forced to lean into it for balance. Fortunately, the night was clear and the air still. The curious hunter pressed upward, cautious but no longer scared of the animal who stood as if stuffed and displayed in a white man's lodge. The lights of the blazing sky played across the hide of the bear, which the Inuit realized was sheathed in crystalline ice.

Arluk dropped his knife. There was _ilisiinneq_ on the wind—dark magic, darker spirits.

The seasoned hunter finally followed the gaze of the frozen bear, whose expression showed nary a hint of the animal's legendary defiance or ferocity. Her wide eyes and snarling muzzle were petrified in something comparable to fright, as if the animal recognized a predator even more formidable than she.

When he finally beheld the tilted ruin of the Blæst Gående rig, Arluk, a practical man, bowed and sang in the old tongue for the bear's spirit. He sang reluctantly for the men of the oil platform, too. Though he suspected them accountable for their fate, Arluk feared their lingering _tupilaq_ were certain to frighten off the local game. Beyond the ruined oil platform, far to the north, far beyond the limit of the hunter's keen sight, tore a screech akin to a herd of besieged mammoths trumpeting in unison. It was a sound Arluk recognized and had not heard in 15 years. He ran toward his camp, leaving the dead walrus behind.

---

It had been ages since another being touched its mind as Rlim Shaikorth did to Gamera now. _Behold, Oh Kurmara!_ It had used an ancient variant of the super monster's name. _Mine is the cold that extinguishes suns! Not the Black Guardian, nor any power in the cosmos will prevent the white death I unleash on this world. I am he who even the gods may not oppose!_

Gamera had been subject to both the White Worm's freezing helix and its insufferable boasting eons ago. Rlim Shaikorth was a connoisseur of the black wizards of lost Hyperborea, he pried from them a thousand secrets of the arcane before devouring them utterly—their flesh, their souls, and their eldritch essences. A side effect of the monster's insatiable appetites was to be infused with the tatters and scraps of its victims' personas. While the mind of an Old One was generally incomprehensible and alien, Rlim Shaikorth's was one of the few contaminated by the attitudes of humankind. It allowed the White Worm to make itself understood to mortals and mortal sympathizers like Gamera. In ages past, shortly after it had been the agent of Gamera's eons-long oblivion, the terrible annelid had inadvertently revealed to a mortal magician the source of its own undoing. Perhaps it would do so now, perhaps not. The guardian tortoise would not make the same mistake in either case—it had nothing it wanted to "say" to the Old One anyway. Its job was to execute it.

Rlim Shaikorth crawled, stretching and contracting its segmented bulk toward the glacier into whose face its foe was embedded. A lipless, smiling maw bisected the flat disk of the White Worm's face, its crimson eyes, resembling globular blood clots, leaked gore as if they were tears. _Has the Elds' pet truly fallen to the least of my abilities?_ it shouted directly into Gamera's mind, undecided whether or not the chelonian demigod had survived its attack. When Gamera did not stir, the Old One's telepathic soliloquy was aimed at nothing specific, save the land and the stars themselves.

_Hearken Forgotten Ones! Attend Ulthar and Hagarg Ryonis, if your sluggish minds yet pierce the Wall of Sleep! It is your progeny I have again vanquished! No longer have you a power in this world. I am healed, and will set upon your garden green a white death, an eternal frost wherever my light is cast!_

Gamera was trapped. It needed to protect its head and limbs from the White Worm, which were, save its left leg, incapable of reaching very far out of its shell, wedged as it was in the glacier. Worse, it needed to fuel and reignite its inner fire. While its arcane organs could harness electromagnetic waves enabling it to sense its prey or levitate, their main function was to ionize Gamera's flames, providing its jet propulsion and devastating weaponry.

Rlim Shaikorth coiled and from the tip of its tail extended a thin, whip-like tentacle. As the Old One gurgled a susurrus hauntingly reminiscent of crude words, the extracted appendage writhed and traced a symbol in the frigid night air. A glyph formed, black and yet somehow brilliant, suspended as if branded into the flesh of space. The abominable annelid culminated its echoing chant with a noisome keen comparable to an eagle inhaling a hurricane.

As the White Worm's voice trailed and the blasphemous symbol dissipated, the mountain of ice in which Gamera was embedded began to shake, then slowly collapse in on itself. The glacier had come alive and was slurping down the shelled morsel in its lips, not stopping until it had seemingly sucked in its own face as well. When the Black Guardian was wholly enveloped, the icy cliff sealed its fracture of a mouth and then rumbled rhythmically, as if chewing.

Gamera felt the crush of the ice mountain even through its bio-metallic shell. The masticating glacier formed sharp interior teeth which bit down upon, but failed to pierce, its carapace. On its underside, however, the icy fangs relentlessly drilled at the turtle-like monster's more vulnerable plastron, and gouged their way through. Before its internal processes broke down and its supernatural abilities failed, the super monster felt Rlim Shaikorth turn dismissively and wriggle away to the south, and its own green life's blood pour down into whatever crevices the glacier retained.

---

Arluk, exhausted from his run across the bleak vastness, reached the edge of the Nakotiqa camp and collapsed. As his startled tribesfolk gathered around his prostate form, the hunter muttered, "_ilisiinneq_ on the air! The Devil's envoy! We must leave!" Believing him possessed, they brought him to the igloo of Oogroq, the nomads' chief.

Amid a flurry of questions and suspicions, Oogroq sent the agitated tribesfolk away and tended to the feverish hunter. As he chanted magical words of healing, the old man prepared a fire and a cauldron of herbs. Scented smoke swirled into a small hole in the dome's ceiling. The flames crackled and cast their dancing light on the interior of the headman's snow house. Revealed within were the tanned hides of caribou and muskoxen, thoroughly covered with curvilinear sigils and crude figures in red dye. Lengths of driftwood and pieces of bone were similarly etched. The Nakotiqa chief, who also fulfilled the role of _angakkuq_, or shaman, kept woven baskets of effects, the contents of which his people ascribed a range of inscrutable origins and uses. While the Nakotiqa had converted to the white man's savior generations ago—even their wrinkled headman bore a crucifix—none were wholly divorced from their ancestors' beliefs.

The continuation of Arluk's ramblings preceded the opening of his eyes. Oogroq took stock of the hunter's delirious words as he gradually coaxed his patient to consciousness. "And the Devil's envoy returns…" groaned Arluk before he sat up, eyes widened, in a cold sweat.

"You have heard the voice of the Destroyer," charged Oogroq, who jabbed his long, bony finger to Arluk's bare chest—just above the middle-aged Inuit's pale, spearhead-shaped birthmark. The hunter, now fully cognizant, took quick stock of his surroundings. He lay upon the igloo's raised sleeping area, which was covered in furs. The headman, Arluk noticed, was now garbed in the archaic trappings of an _angakkuq_. Though he hadn't cast aside his crucifix, Oogroq had covered his craggy face with red glyphs, had wrapped his arms and throat with entwined fetishes of bone and soapstone, and gripped an inscribed whalebone rod. Over his shoulders the aged shaman had draped a yellowing white pelt. The dead creature's scalp and upper jaw formed a hood, and Arluk gaped with revulsion at its deformity. Its curved fangs were far crueler than a bear's. Affixed to the fore of the animal's oversized crown was what resembled a narwhal's spiraling tooth. The cape further betrayed the seemingly non-ursine origins of the hide, for dangling at its edges were strips of what were once six, not four, clawed legs.

Arluk had seen the cloak before when he was a younger man, 25 years or so ago. Oogroq had donned it when allaying a curse upon the military men who drove the Nakotiqa off one of their territories so a great weather and radar station could be built. The curse didn't work, of course, and the skeptical Arluk dismissed the mantle, repellent as it was, as a clever product of taxidermy, or the skin of mutant warped by the white man's poisons. Long had the no-nonsense hunter regarded the labors of the _angakkuq_ as so much sleight-of-hand and trickery. For now, though, it was hard to dismiss the old man. Arluk was speechless as the shaman stood over him, showing in a crazed smile teeth which contrasted Oogroq's painted face.

"Answer, you idiot!" shrieked Oogroq. His voice sounded like a wheezing muskox.

"I want to go to my wife," answered Arluk, "and we need to leave this place. All of us" The hunter attempted to rise from the shaman's bed of furs. Falling back on his elbows, he said, "to the north, I heard its cry! It sounded like…"

"Ssshhh," hissed the _angakkuq_, who waved his arms and clutched his crucifix. The beads and charms about him clinked and rattled. "Say not its name, fool! You would give it power or bring it upon us."

"It toppled the fortress of the oil men," Arluk calmly replied. "It is already upon us."

The Nakotiqa headman seemed to consider this for a moment, then glowered at Arluk. "You don't know anything," he said, prodding Arluk with his finger to accentuate each syllable. "Do you remember when the foreigners came to us, fifteen years ago, and what they wanted of us?"

"I do. And the consequences," recalled Arluk, "the white fire, and those caught near it left shadows of ash. What that foreigner wanted of us was absurd, that is, until…"

"Until you saw IT with your own stupid eyes! Ha ha ha!" cackled Oogroq before a coughing fit struck him. This time it was the shaman's turn to lie down, as Arluk, summoning his strength, stood and embraced the ailing old man. The hunter gently lowered the costumed _angakkuq_ to the bed of furs while Oogroq repaid him with several raps of the whalebone wand to Arluk's shoulders and back. "I am… FINE," rasped the shaman. Blood dribbled from his mouth down his chin.

"Father," pleaded Arluk, "please rest while I make us ready to leave. The old magic won't do us any good now."

Oogroq lay on his back, betraying his human frailty and sickness for all the fearsomeness of his garb. He smacked his son again with the wand, this time just below the knee. As the hunter yelped in pain and lost his balance, Oogroq said, "I am still the chief, boy! And you will do as I ask. You have said our gods dance to a new tune? Know that the song surges from the throats of the eldest chorus." The shaman muttered a word of power and gestured with the whalebone rod.

"What…" was all Arluk managed to come back with before he felt a fog upon his mind and a great weight upon his shoulders. His smarting leg, where his father had struck him, felt as if its bones were made of broken glass. Arluk dared not stand, and the chief's words formed vivid pictures in the mist before his eyes.

"Know my son, what you have ever suspected," intoned the old man in the commanding voice of the man he was so many decades ago, "that once _Kalaallit Nunaat _was blanketed in warm forests, and the foreigner who named it _Grænland_ did so not, as the tale holds, because he wanted to lure settlers, but because he dreamt of its distant past. Maybe the Old Ones who yet sleep in the black gulfs below the ice reached him in dreams, I know not.

"Upon this once green land trod a race of gold giants, who, owing to their sorcery, we might as well call gods. Among them lurked our ancestors, who had migrated southwest from dying Lomar at the world's scalp. The gold giants built great cities and wielded powerful charms against the monsters of the depths. But even they, mere generations removed from the divinities who stole unto the earth, even they needed the secret names to work their magic!

"In Lomar, we had been chosen by the Great Spirits to learn the Nakotiqa for which we are named. These teachings encompass the breadth of time—from the blind chaos that spawned the world to the silent void that will someday swallow souls and stars—and countless eras between. In exchange we allowed the Great Spirits to borrow our skins, as their own forms were but thoughts.

"While the giants of this new land trod upon us and enslaved us, treated us as beasts—they begged for our wisdom out the corners of their mouths. We would not give up every secret; the starry lore of _Yith_ and _Yuggoth_, the snake people, the _Shan_ wasps and the primal shapers on the other side of the earth. Their mysteries we kept. The forbidden names we did share. Though I will not repeat them now, they are known by such epithets as 'Sleeper of _N'kai_,' 'The Thousand Eyes,' 'The Source of Uncleanliness,' 'The Spider God,' and more besides. There was a price for our help, and in time we became the giants' masters! We took some of the golden ones as consorts and others we seduced to our forms of worship. After the patchwork offspring of the Lier-in-Wait fell in battle, it was by our discretion that the children of the Eld kept the Old Ones at peace. It was truly a golden age.

"But all ages turn, and the day came when the world upended, and the ice devoured the forests and cities of _Kalaallit Nunaat_. The golden giants who'd not mixed with us escaped to the sea. Many folk have come and gone from this land since. But we of the Nakotiqa remain, to keep the peace with Those Below, to use the wisdom of the Great Spirits. Do you understand?"

Arluk nodded, as the fog lifted from his mind and blood circulated once again in his bruised leg. Then Oogroq continued, "the end is nigh, and we have one last thing to do. Those of us who have remained here through the ages, who have resisted the temptations of the white man's world, we're worthy of joining the Great Spirits. The Destroyer and the Guardian, Fire and Ice, fight at the age's end, for our destiny. But the outcome is in doubt. Among the prophesies is one that says there, here, a savior will arise to tip the balance. One that bears a mark like a grey flame!" Oogroq drew himself up with inexplicable vigor and again prodded his son's bare chest. A subtle white aura seemed to envelope the bent old _angakkuk. _Arluk, astonished, felt as if every breath had flown from his lungs. The de-pigmented, spearhead shaped blotch on his chest could indeed be seen as a flame.

"What are we to do?" asked Arluk to the shaman, when again he found his voice. The hunter gazed pensively out the igloo's clear ice window. Though it was deadest night, and had begun to snow, the tribe loitered about awaiting word of Arluk's condition, or an explanation for what had horrified him so. The shaman glared daggers at his son, and with some sadness, as if he expected the hunter to know the obvious answer to his own question. Arluk looked inwardly, touched the birthmark over his heart, and found that he did.

---

Gamera was familiar with the sensation of swimming in a soup of its own green gore. While its instinct was to sleep, the Black Tortoise did not have much time. If it indulged in its regenerative hibernation now, it would lose the opportunity to escape its icy prison. It will have failed in the same manner, against the same opponent, as it had untold eons ago. Gamera could not leave its reemergence to chance, much less the caprice of its human "allies" who were just as likely to prefer it entombed, reemergence of the Old Ones notwithstanding. Gamera fell long ago in an age of powerful sorcerer-scientists, knowledgeable scholar-priests, and exalted god-kings. They understood the delicate foundation upon which their dominion lay. They recognized the enemy, and knew well their signs and omens. They mastered the rites that the Eld designed to keep the embattled Old Ones quiescent. The debased mortals of the modern age were ill-equipped for the cosmic storm on the horizon. The stars were right—diabolic, mind-blasting forces were in motion, tearing down the ramparts of the cosmos, ushering in an eternal, abominable night to supersede the dawn of a new, golden age for humankind. Gamera knew it was their last hope.

Gamera felt pain like a mortal organism, a characteristic its architects believed would make it a more conscious warrior. Its reaction to pain, however, was not like a biological creature. It had a limited capacity to suffer. Pain was a signal to the monster's brain to be cautious, but it did not cringe from its wounds. Nothing short of nigh-total bodily annihilation would force the demigod to shut down and sleep, though it was normally strategic to do so before then. In the state it was in, most of its supernal organs were defunct. Damaged as they were, Gamera could not hope to influence the world's electromagnetic energies—it could not levitate, generate heat, produce fire or plasma, nor could it sense the locality of its enemies. Gamera's effectiveness as a warrior was limited.

All the Black Guardian could do was bleed. Considering the nature of its prison, that might be enough.

A green slush had formed beneath Gamera's broken body. The dark magic of Rlim Shaikorth had faded and the glacier had reverted to its normal, inanimate state. The reptilian goliath was suspended upside-down. Wracked with pain, the crippled demigod extended its right forearm, barely forcing it through its warped limb cavity. Gamera's razor-sharp talon finally touched the point where the edges of its wrecked shell pressed up against the ice floor. It scratched, then clawed at the blood-softened ice beneath it. Before long, it had excavated enough to manipulate its right claw outside its shell. Time passed, and eventually Gamera was able to orient its entire body downward, bringing both claws into play. Then its head emerged, enabling it to gnaw at the deepening floor. As it dug, Gamera's warm blood discovered new cracks to flow into, further weakening the ice. The monster turtle persisted like this, following the green rivulets into the nadir of the glacier and, finally, beyond.

When it broke under the ice cap, Gamera felt cool, briny water flow around it. The Black Guardian of the North allowed itself to sink to the sea floor and succumbed to sleep.


	4. Clutch of the Cold Ones

"_In the time of my grandsires had the Ice whelmed Polarion; in the days of my father Mu Thulan had been lost to men; and now (say the hardy travelers who had dared risk the wrath of the Cold Ones, those white spirits of the ice, or their dread Master, the abnormality: Rlim Shaikorth), even the spires of sunny Varaad are sheathed in sparkling frost, and the jungles wither, blasted by the cold_."  
~ Athlok, from a translation of Fragment MXI of the Pnakotic Manuscripts  
(Lin Carter, "The Acolyte of the Flame")

**Lincoln Sea, northwest of Greenland, 1980**

"Looks like a huge worm's made its appearance, Sir," chirped the voice of Captain Matt Church, informally known to his flight mates as Deacon.

"Cut the jokes, Harpoon Three," chided Major Caleb Travares, using his flight lieutenant's operational designation. "This isn't an exercise." During engagements, Travares was Harpoon One, leader of renowned 466 Intercept Squadron—nicknamed Harpoon Squadron—part of AIRCOM's 11 Wing Polaris based outside Yellowknife. The Harpoons flew CF-104s, deadly supersonic jets nicknamed "Widowmakers" in perfect formation over the craggy Canadian Arctic Archipelago. Harpoons Two, Four, and Five, were known respectively as Fisher (an outdoorsman), Solo (a sci-fi buff), and Bowler (because of his favorite hat). Travares deflected his flight mate's continuous attempts to stick him with a handle. Since he once flew a CF101 Voodoo, Deacon shamelessly tried to get people to call the Major "Papa Doc." Deacon thought it was clever while the rest of the squadron thought it was racist. Travares, a man of Dominican descent, was simply not in favor of being associated with the infamous Haitian dictator.

"Come on Doc," whined Deacon, "you can't believe the Alert guys. Most of those shoes ain't seen the sun in weeks. They're stir-crazy." Deacon was referring to a call issued from Canadian Forces Station Alert, a communications and signal intercept station just over 800 kilometers from the North Pole. A few hours earlier, CFS Alert caught an S.O.S from Greenland's Blæst Gående oil platform. That distress call was suddenly silenced—though they did pick up a suspicious, encrypted mobile phone signal about fifteen minutes later. Alert had sent a helicopter to investigate and the crew reported that the rig appeared derelict. Approaching close to ground, the helo crew discovered the workmen's bodies, then became frantic. The last communiqués CFS Alert picked up from the panic-stricken recon team were "ghosts in the snow," "frozen bodies," "bio-anomaly," and, yes, "giant worm."

Later, Alert's radar picked up a massive, unidentified object within 21 kilometers and closing—moving across the polar ice at a pace comparable to the cruising speed of a heavy tank. Further, the object gave out some bizarre signal noise. The Harpoons, the closest interceptors, were given the order to "kick the tires and light the fires" and scrambled out of Yellowknife. Years ago, Canada and the US would have had more planes in the air in the Arctic Circle. While the USSR still posed a threat to North America, the Cold War seemed to be waning, or at least seemed less likely these days to be decided by air jockeys and their lawn darts.

Travares radioed back to base that his guys were flying low, as commanded, at "cherubs three." Despite the falling snow the Major reported, "we should have visual of the unidentified object in under a minute."

The squadron resented this assignment, especially the uncomfortable anti-exposure gear they all had to wear—but all were intensely curious. Nearly every pilot had a "friend of a friend," ostensibly stationed in the Far East, who'd engaged _something _whose appearance and proportions grew ever more terrible as the story circulated. From the mid-Sixties to the beginning of the Seventies, weird tales of "bio-anomalies," casually known as monsters and _kaiju_, were all the rage in the Asian media. In the West, the stories were debunked as a result of the so-called "Guilong War;" efforts by Communist China to disrupt Japan's extraordinary economic growth. Allegedly, while the U.S. was mired in Vietnam, China assailed Japan with destructive experimental weapons that incited mass hysteria. Many Japanese, influenced by the famous "Gamera" hoax of 1965 and their own superstitions, blamed "_kaiju_" for the disasters. But now in 1980, in Japan as anywhere else in the world, admitting a belief in monsters was to be dismissed as a crackpot. The Major agreed with the assessment. The fuzzy photographs, the always misplaced physical "evidence," the tabloid interviews with daft eyewitnesses and sham scientists—none of it added up. _Why did people believe in nonsense?_ mused Travares. _Giant monsters. Voodoo. Little green men. Sasquatch. Ghosts…_

For a split second, the Major thought he saw a figure pressing up against the right side of his cockpit bubble. _Obviously a hallucination_, he thought. The pilot knew that the idea of a man outside the window 300 meters up at a thousand kilometers an hour was ridiculous. The man, as it appeared for the moment it existed in Travares' mind, was wearing a colorless Canadian Forces Info-Ops uniform. His bluish-white hands and face pushed against the glass panels as his body floated behind him, irrespective of the sheering winds and g-forces. After shaking off the phantom's afterimage, Travares commanded, "eyes open Harpoons."

"Can't see anything in this goo, Doc" grumbled Deacon, referring to the snowfall, "giant worms or otherwise."

"That's it, Harpoon Three!" yelled Travares, "I've had it with your…"

The Major's reprimand was cut off by a sudden flash of white light at the flight's 9-o'clock, where Deacon was holding his place in the arrowhead formation. All the squadron's instruments told them the same thing—that Harpoon Three's lights just went out. Deacon's plane dropped like a stone and crashed onto the ice sheet with a dull thud. "Deacon's bird should have lit up like Christmas, Major!" stammered Solo, noting the lack of an explosion. Their fighters were heavily armed—all packed a formidable compliment of missiles.

A shift in the wind parted the snow, and the Harpoons all caught the sight of an enormous, horrific face, a mere 80 to 100 meters below them. None had to guess that the impossible entity which they each bore witness was the source of the flash. Fisher made the "I can't believe it" whistle. Bowler yelped, and knew that if he survived this, his future nightmares would involve giant eyes resembling milky coagula. Solo shrieked, before stammering "n-now there's an eleven pucker factor!" The rest of the squadron knew that meant poor Solo had lost control in a manner that would make peeling off his flight suit nasty business. None of the Harpoons could blame him. On that particular scale, they were all pushing ten.

Travares kept his head, tried to ignore the imaginary specter that reappeared on his Widowmaker's canopy, and commed base that they had engaged "the anomaly." Procedurally, control would then leave the intercept to the flight's jurisdiction. The pilots needed to concentrate. They were already losing it. This time, however, was different.

"Harpoons," returned a calm, unfamiliar voice. "This engagement is officially designated Top Secret. The nature of your target must not be discussed. Period. You will not be debriefed by anyone with less than a General's rank or Level Three Government Security Clearance. Good luck gentlemen. Control out." Each of the Harpoons thought the man sounded way too young to be giving them orders.

Though the Harpoons crowded the channel with questions for their leader, all chatter was drowned out by the raging wail of the smiling, slug-like abomination that appeared and disappeared behind the billowing curtains of snow. To Travares, it suggested an ill-trained soprano recorded on a scratchy 45, played backwards on a stadium PA. What they could see of the landscape was just as disheartening—jagged ice forming treacherous crags and towering cliffs. The worm crept peristaltically through the canyons near sea level.

"Confirmed, the anomaly is headed to the ball," radioed Travares, "the ball" signifying Alert Station itself, designated thusly because of its distinctive, disco ball-like radomes. Meanwhile, the spirit he was stubbornly ignoring appeared to be climbing through the glass hatch, and was about halfway into the CF-104's cockpit.

The flight managed to turn in formation, dropped their noses toward the slithering colossus, and began to unload their M61 Vulcan cannons. The revolving guns each blazed forth a fusillade of 20 millimeter explosive rounds. The screaming shells were powerful enough to saw off a mountaintop, and the fighter pilots could not imagine any organism, especially one as seemingly soft bodied as the monster worm, surviving their onslaught. Before impacting the sickly, semi-translucent flesh of the gore-weeping creature, the giant bullets passed through a wavering field of air surrounding it. Their molecular integrity seemingly undone, the shells shattered, dropped, or bounced harmlessly off the creature.

"Keep your heads guys," urged the Major to his squadron, as they lifted up and around again toward the entity. They'd try missiles now. "Uglier looking things in the ocean. Nothing but a big…"

"Orders, Major!" reprimanded the mysterious voice on the radio. Travares wondered who this pencil-pusher was. The imaginary ghost in his cockpit crowded behind him and reached toward the controls. The instruments and panels frosted over and became nigh-unreadable. A blinker alerting the pilot to temperatures detrimental to the machinery and his life had come on. Travares noticed none of it. When the Major glanced over his shoulder, the spectral man in the Info-Ops jumpsuit scrunched its pallid face in a bestial scowl. What remained of his teeth were like thorns. "So… cold," gasped the spirit.

The White Worm carried on nonchalantly. It seemed it was no longer paying any mind to the renowned Harpoons.

"O-okay guys," managed Travares, swallowing his fear. "Let's light this candle. Fox three at..."

"N-no can do Major!," interrupted Solo, before he burst out laughing. "Got stowaways with me!" To Travares' horror, Solo ejected while his plane barrel-rolled toward Fisher. Fisher attempted to jink away as Solo's chair, cackling pilot yet strapped in, shot up into his jet's intake. For a split second, Fisher's turbines sputtered and struggled to grind up the gory mass. The delay prevented him from clearing the spinning path of Solo's out-of-control jet. Just before the explosive collision, the Major thought he saw two bluish-white figures in the open cockpit of what had been Solo's plane, each oblivious to the rushing air or the imminent crash. Both seemed to wear oil rigger coveralls.

Travares' own uninvited copilot smiled as the fires of the collision reflected off him. It was as if the figure was made of ice and snow. The wraith suddenly turned its head toward him, widened its dead eyes, and sank its ruined teeth into Travares' shoulder. The uncanny chill he felt was like icy fingers fondling his internal organs. The pain in his shoulder, though, was as hideously plain as the gout of blood painting the inside of his CF-104's canopy. No longer able to pretend the phantom was imaginary, the Major launched his guided missiles in the general direction of the overgrown grub and ejected.

His chair unfurled a parachute, and Travares was jerked back and dragged slowly away from the fray by the winds. Two missiles he loosed, but there was one explosion, far afield of the White Worm. The other just bounced off the leviathan without detonating. A dud perhaps, or neutralized by the shimmering air shielding the creature. His plane continued to cruise toward the north. It would come down sooner or later. Snow and distance was soon to spare him any further eyewitness to the disaster.

The last thing the Major saw was Bowler making a beeline toward the enormous slug as it vermiculated through a narrow ice chasm. A barrage of missiles and explosive shells preceded the hellbent pilot. At first, it looked as if the suicide run would have little effect on the White Worm. The artillery appeared useless. Rather than a blaze of glory, plane and pilot quietly began to come apart upon contact with the monster annelid's invisible shield. Due perhaps to the heat of the concentrated barrage, or the aircraft's mass, the core of the jet managed to pierce through the shimmering cloak of air, colliding with the serpentine body of the entity. For a moment, the White Worm's expression registered surprise before it keened in pain. Its globular eyes erupted in crimson spews. Shockwaves from the bombardment boomed off the ice canyon's cliffs, which became further compromised when the thrashing creature smashed its colossal bulk against them.

Travares saw the White Worm engulfed in an avalanche of icy shards, but its hideous, inverse wailing continued to carry over the frozen sea. It was slowed, Travares knew, not stopped. _Bowler_, thought the Major, _why didn't you eject? God bless you, my friend. We CAN hurt that thing. _He saluted.

As the wind carried him from the monster's deafening cries, Travares tried to put the deaths of his comrades from his mind. Tears would just freeze on his face, but _oh _how they wanted to flow. _Remember your training._ Travares tried to think of something positive, and the last few minutes' calamity began to wither away from his consciousness. He found himself very glad for his anti-exposure gear. He wondered why he still felt so cold; remembered the suit breach and wound about his shoulder, which he stemmed with his hand. He had lost a lot of blood. _How? _He couldn't recall anymore. _Have to patch that mess up when I land_, he mused. _Good thing the chair has a first aid kit. _Travares thought that he might actually make it home alive. During the long trip down, the Major kept himself optimistic by thinking about his kids, their mom, and the tropical warmth of his father's beloved island. What he couldn't ignore, however, was the voice behind him.

"S-so… very… cold," it rasped.

---

_How much time had passed?_ A nigh-immortal, Gamera measured its existence by broad spans. It could sleep for what was to it a moment and new life-forms might have developed, fulfilling ecological niches forsaken by long extinct predecessors. The planet it was spawned to protect could face geological upheavals that seemed devastating from an epochal perspective, but were gradually adapted to by those whose perceptions were less farseeing. It had lived to witness seas boil and cool, continents form only to break apart and sink, species evolve and then disappear, distant suns brighten and wink out. Gamera, though, was designed to be conscious of what was, to its mind, microscopic moments in time. Without this awareness, it would have been difficult for the Black Guardian to regard humanity at all. Empires arose and fell for every thump of its massive heart—what would a human lifetime otherwise mean to such an ancient force?

Its ability to focus upon infinitesimal fragments of time also served the reptilian demigod well in moments such as these. Gamera knew it could ill-afford more than a few hours rest, though its battered body demanded days. While it regenerated quickly in slumber, the dragon turtle awoke retaining severe damage to its bio-metallic shell. Gamera's carapace was a wreck. Its plastron was still horrifically perforated though it was no longer bleeding. The colossus's supernatural organs had reconstructed themselves, barely—they only possessed a limited functionality before which they would burst.

Gamera swam in the manner of a freshwater turtle beneath the ice cap, seeking out an area thin enough for it to break through to the surface. It still needed to consume flame and combustible fuels to reignite its internal furnace.

Gamera extended its senses, shifting its great human-like eyes back and forth. Rlim Shaikorth had stopped moving, but Gamera knew the Old One still lived. Perhaps the mortals had detected it and found some way to slow it down. There were no significant settlements this close to the pole; but the White Worm was headed to a base that harnessed radio waves. Gamera had passed over it on the way to battle, electromagnetically obfuscating its own presence as it did so. The station was sparsely inhabited. Should the champion of the Eld manage to obtain the fuel it needed from the ruined refinery, the mortals at the base could be saved. If it failed, the fires Gamera hungered for would instead need to be coaxed out of the base, its personnel, it judged, were an acceptable sacrifice.

---

The fading Travares, still nestled in the ejection seat, jolted at the sound of muffled pounding and tremors. The Cold Ones lingered about him, now a quartet. In his semi-consciousness, they clawed at him, and the Major could vaguely feel their ghostly fingers across his flesh, sometimes upon his eyes, his heart, or brain. But their ability to become solid enough to harm him had its limits. The spirits resembled the White Worm's victims—two were dressed as oil riggers, another, the same one who followed him from his fighter jet, wore its familiar Info-Ops uniform. The last, in an AIRCOM flight suit, was Deacon, his once happy-go-lucky features contorted in agony.

Physically, the wraiths seemed made of nothing more than granules of blue-white ice. Their forms, or parts of them, would randomly disperse and drift off just before they recomposed themselves. Despite their weightlessness, the Cold Ones did not seem to be at the mercy of the air, floating with or against the wind as they pleased. They could harden no more than bits of themselves, and then only through concentration. By gesturing with his ground flare and shouting, Travares was able, barely, to keep the ghosts from pulling apart the shreds of parachute bandaging his shoulder, biting him again, or clawing out his eyes. They still made it difficult for him to access the survival kit from its compartment on the ejection chair. The Major didn't have much time, survival kit or no. He was getting very sleepy, and once he dropped his flare, he knew the specters would rip him apart.

Again the thud and a vibration. Travares had no idea if he was on solid ground or an ice sheet. Whether it was an earthquake or a whale trying to break itself a breathing hole didn't matter—he'd be dead soon. The Cold Ones weren't phased. Another great thump resounded from below and Travares lost his grip on the flare. He didn't feel as if he had the strength to unbind himself from the chair in order to reach it. The Major's fleeting energies were all but spent retrieving the flare in the first place and lighting it, then in reeling in the parachute and wrapping it around his bloody shoulder.

The Cold Ones drifted toward him, their ravenous mouths open as if to feast.

There was another great thud and the ground buckled. Travares' chair bounced up and landed on its side. All around him echoed the creaking and cracking of shifting ice. The snow-forged apparitions closed on him, but their path was suddenly obstructed by a great, white, hornlike object that stabbed up out of the ground. There were two—its twin had come up with it, a half dozen or so meters away. At last taken aback, the wraiths dissipated and reformed well away from the things. The dual protrusions ripped across the ice, remaining equilaterally distant as if they were attached to some infinitely larger thing below. Great water-filled rifts in the icecap formed in their wake as they swiveled and crushed. The giant tusks, for that is what to Travares they appeared to be, sank back into the sea. They left behind a swirling lake of broken ice, over a dozen meters in diameter.

The quartet of Cold Ones circled around it, single-minded in their desire to eviscerate the stubbornly still-living pilot. Deacon was at their lead. Travares finally made a Herculean effort to free himself from the upended chair. "Come on Deacon," said the battered Major, forcing a smile, "Come on, man, you remember ol' Papa Doc, right? You can call me that if you want. Don't bother me a bit."

"So… cold…" the phantom replied, "so… hungry…"

Within two meters of his prostate body, the ghosts flowed in for the kill. But the helpless pilot was focused on the recently excavated lake behind them, and the monstrous, crocodilian claw that reached out from it. The mighty hand, clawed and scaled like a reptile yet bearing a human-like thumb, scooped up the oblivious Cold Ones and closed upon them. _Can ghosts be crushed? _wondered Travares, and decided that, _yes, indeed they can! _when he heard their hoarse voices cry out before fading away.

_And what is this thing burying its killing claw in the ice in front of me? What is this monster, hauling its bulk up through the portal it chewed, first its dragon head with boar tusks… Then the rest, its shell with saw-tooth edges widening the gap, breaking its way to the surface? It is huge! The thing howls, its voice sounds like a hundred trumpets out of tune. No way. It can't be. It crawls over, cautious to my presence, I'm a bug to it. It looks right at me, those intelligent eyes move back and forth. What does it want?_

---

Gamera, saltwater and ice cascading off its shell, climbed out of the sea on all fours. It then stood upright and bellowed again. It was wary of the dying human before it. The man seemed helpless, but the super monster knew that it might require his knowledge and his tiny hands. It expected the human to be grateful for eliminating the Cold Ones who besieged him. If only it could make the empathically blind mortal understand its desires…

---

"GAMERA! Holy $%! You're $%ing real!" After the prosaic musing of his fevered mind, his mouth gave way to the colossal reality standing, godlike, over him. It was nearly impossible for Travares to do anything but curse. "What other $%'s the government keeping quiet?" he shouted, as if the giant turtle could answer. "Santa Clause around here somewhere? $% orders. My kids aren't going to believe this $%." Giant worms and ghosts were one thing. A media phenomenon widely and aggressively written off as a hoax was another. _Maybe too aggressively_, considered the Major.

Gamera dropped again to all fours and planted the hand that crushed the Cold Ones at Travares' side. He could feel its anomalous warmth. The turtle-like giant moved its head from side to side. Its pupils rolled and it grunted a cloud of steam. Travares was beginning to think the monster was waiting on him. Bolstered by the beast's body heat, the Major finished undoing the latches binding him to the chair. He lit another flare, and Gamera voiced a long, deep, reptilian growl.

While accessing the first aid kit to dress his wound, Travares looked up and said, "l-look, uh, not sure if you know English or if you can hear me, but are you here to kill that worm thing?" Gamera glared down at him and grunted again, belching another cloud of steam. Travares stitched up his shoulder with a needle heated by the flare. "Because," he managed to continue, "it radiates absolute zero cold. But it's not airtight. If you concentrate heat or matter on one spot, the field fights to keep up."

The dragon turtle regarded him, seemingly quizzically.

"O-okay, I, well… thanks," said Travares, opening another compartment under the ejection seat. "I'm going to get my radio going, and I think the Americans are going to be here soon." The pilot imagined that it would not be long before another squadron arrived, probably from the Thule base in western Greenland. Or, at least, a search and rescue craft. As he struggled to activate the radio, the leviathan took the pilot up in his scaly hand and set him among the fore scutes of its carapace—just behind its neck. "Hey!" protested the Major, but Gamera was already lumbering on two legs toward Blæst Gående, quaking the ground with a determined tread.

---

Of the Nakotiqa, all forty-three had set out from their campsite, abandoning it to the elements. The forsaken Inuit—mostly women, elders, the malformed and disabled, and a few young children—were clad in thick dark leathers trimmed with furs. Six near-skeletal muskoxen were loaded with their meager possessions, and a pair of mange-stricken elk drew a sleigh of trade goods. The somber throng, all who remained of a people who beheld the breadth and totality of time, who survived through a not-insignificant fraction of it, followed close the old _angakkuq _Oogroq and his son, now chief, Arluk.

Thickly bearded Arluk, aged yet hale and heavily built, was draped in what had earlier been his father's mantle. The strange white hide of the mono-horned, bear-like beast, six clawed limbs fluttering in the breeze behind him, lent the hunter a regal, if savage air. It was Arluk who clutched the enchanted whalebone rod in his strong, mittened hands, having had it and the cloak presented to him before the tribe in a quick ceremony. It seemed to his people as if the hunter drew especial warmth from the hide or the wand. For despite the arctic chill, the new chief's downy chest was exposed to display his grey, flame-shaped nevus. Arluk showed no aversion to the cold, nor any of the cynicism that had previously characterized him—his deep-set eyes were reddened with purpose.

The wizard Oogroq danced through the snow with an uncanny vigor, just behind his son. The old man had donned a fearsome mask. It was three times as long as the wearer's face and twice as wide, made of driftwood and trimmed with feathers and bones. Superficially, it resembled a human skull, albeit a hideously distorted one, as if it were stretched from its scalp and chin. The mask's face was bleached white and highlighted with faded blacks and blues, as was the plumage which haloed it. Within its blackened eye sockets were painted red stars. The _angakkuq _likewise wore a pair of oversized gloves, both were white and had elongated fingers as long as he was tall. Oogroq would break every now and then from his cavorting and the mask would appear to split open from a hinge located on the tip of the head. Behind the bisected skull was yet another, smaller face—a crude blue-grey starburst with eyes and a smile. When he opened the mask, Oogroq would look menacingly from side to side.

Long gone from the old man's garb was the gold crucifix he wore for nearly half a century. This was a night for the spirits and the magic of old, and the white man's savior would proffer no succor.

The procession ascended a great rise, a soaring plateau. They had traveled many kilometers upon the ice cap, but now land lay beneath their weary feet—albeit land encrusted in rime. None, save perhaps the shaman, had been to this hidden islet nor navigated the narrow path that coiled toward its zenith. After many woeful steps, the piteous people and their beasts arrived at the top, and were momentarily gladdened at the chance to rest—to touch the sky and to gaze out across the vastness. The children among them reached higher, tiny hands innocently hoping to scoop up the aurora in its liquid green-blue brilliance.

But Arluk, with a poise befitting the Inuto lords of old, gestured further inland with the whalebone rod. The wand's inscriptions appeared to his followers' tired teary eyes as if they flickered and writhed.

The tribe came to the lip of a caldera, and their final destination lay within a great, pitch-black crater. None could see the bottom through the shadows cast by the depression's inner walls, but it seemed far deeper down than their climb up. The new headman, showing nary a sign of fatigue, ordered his people along and reassured them that the journey was near its end. The prancing old wizard incanted in the secret tongue, and the weather-beaten Nakotiqa suddenly found themselves renewed—as if they had awoken from a quiet night's rest with a belly full of seal.

A narrow ridge spiraled down the cavity's interior slopes. The faint, flickering lights of the Inuits' lamps made shadows churn about them as they descended, doing little to illume their path. The animals soon refused to be prodded any further into the abyss, and all the tribe shared their hesitation. Arluk, still clad in the skin of the mono-horned demon, looked angrily among his company, then turned to his father.

Oogroq chanted and danced again. The crater's darkness fled from green, mephitic fires that erupted off of huge torches arrayed upon the walls and floor. At the nadir of the bowl-shaped hollow a great circle of five marble stones was revealed, each marvelously carved with curvilinear inscriptions and intricate bas-reliefs. The delicacy of the carvings was preserved as if time itself was in this place halted, none seemed touched by erosion. The Nakotiqa, long surrendered to primitivism, marveled at the sophistication of their ancestors. To have carved these monuments was to have possessed a lore they had long forgotten. None but the shaman could read the sigils, but all understood the story told by the bas-reliefs. Winged heroes and majestic giants, some with the heads or bodies of beasts, were depicted in conflict with _things_, fiends of terrible aspect—tentacled, twisted, and amorphous.

"Behold!" roared the masked _angakkuq_ in the tongue of his tribe, and a symbol revealed itself in platinum lines on the ground between the graven plinths. It was a star. Its five radial arms warped sunwise from a central eye of fire.

"Fire and Ice, Defender and Doom, clash at the turn of the age," pronounced Arluk in a voice that echoed endlessly about the chasm. He widened his arms, glanced about his followers and said, "Nakotiq brothers and sisters, we meet here our destiny. Fear not, grieve not, for the Great Spirits, and the Grey Flame, guide us to salvation!"

Enraptured by their chieftain's words, the Nakotiqa formed a circle of hands around the Elder Sign. Arluk approached the glowing glyph's eye and raised the whalebone rod. The old wizard Oogroq stayed outside the circle and went to each of the oxen and elk in turn, opened the skull face of the mask to reveal the starburst face beneath, and silently struck them dead with an exhalation of breath.


End file.
